U-M enrollment hits all-time record this semester (above 50,000)

mGrowOld is eating dinner.

Graduated in 85.  Used to think that was so close.  

1983 here. Gonna be a blue hair any day now. 

Got you beat. Freshman year 1952.  

I got a Go Blue sitting at a cafe next to the Orsay in Paris.

Which makes one think we don’t have anywhere near the largest alumni base.  Someone wearing Michigan gear and saying Go Blue does not make them an alumni.  The alumni also allows members that are not actually alumni, my brother joined and he went to MTU.

When I applied to college, the applications were hand-written. I actually wrote my essay in cursive. That's how old I am. 

Most, not all, kids don't live in the dorms during their sophomore year and beyond.  Just look at all the high rises on campus vs. just 10 years ago.

I think that you are mostly correct with a few small caveats. When I worked and lived in Europe and conversations came up about great schools, it wasn’t necessarily the Ivies that always came up so much as the most prominent Ivies. That usually translated to Harvard and Yale, and sometimes Columbia, but only because most people know either the most prominent schools or the ones in the biggest cities, hence Columbia. Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley would come up a lot and people would tend to group them erroneously with the Ivies. They really don’t grasp that the Ivies are a specific cluster of schools, nor do they make the distinction between private and public schools since almost all universities there are public. It's kind of like if you asked most Americans and they would probably just name Oxford and Cambridge, or maybe even just Oxford because of its higher profile. Not many would be able to name all the other great Russell Group schools like UCL, KCL, Imperial, LSE, St. Andrews, Edinburgh, etc.

The reason that they know these schools in particular is because they make the headlines for much of the high profile research discoveries and start-ups. When you mention Michigan, Chicago, Duke, or Northwestern they are not as familiar, partially because they are not part of the Northeast corridor, the largest population center in the U.S., and partially because they are not as famous as for producing groundbreaking research, huge startups like Facebook, Google, or producing Nobel laureates and the like. You can argue whether this perception is correct or not but it does argue for upping our PR game and going to work on higher profile research and innovation agendas at the expense of just big R&D grants. Michigan gets much more federal grant funding than the Ivies and Ivy-equivalents. The problem is that not much of that research is publicized or perceived to be as foundational or groundbreaking in a way that would elevate our reputation to match that of Harvard-Princeton-Yale, etc. We are the equivalent of BMW or Mercedes in that we put out a premium product at a fairly elevated level but also do a lot of volume, while MIT and Berkeley have more of an ultra-premium reputation akin to Ferrari.  You can see the difference come through in the world rankings of research influence as measured by citation frequency and volume.

As far as Berkeley is concerned, they also have much more renown for some of the research that comes out of all of the national labs (e.g. Lawrence Livermore, National Jet Propulsion) than we do because we don’t have any of those contracts. Berkeley also prioritizes hiring world famous faculty (some over the hill) where we tend to take more chances on up-and-comers who often leave and become famous somewhere else. Lastly, and this is the downside of being associated too much with athletic success, sometimes people would know more about our stadium and how it is the world’s 3rd largest than our great academics. Just a case where sometimes sports sometimes overshadows scholars to the detriment of the school's reputation.